the Screen

Children of Paradise is a great film (certainly my favorite), and more worth seeing than anything else around. The characters are both attractively larger- than-life and full of basic human traumas, and they move with point through the rich decay and underworld glamour of Louis-Philippe's Paris. The concept of the film is daringly poetic for film narrative (the characters' developments are seen largely through their own conscious artistic achievements), but fully achieved. It is a brilliantly acted and mimed film about great mimes and actors who really lived and performed in and around the Boulevard of Crime, But it is as much about different kinds of love, from the infantile to the adolescent to the adult, as it is about the compensating fantasies of theater; as much about every man's need for ideal alternatives beyond the life he actually leads as it is about acting; as much about a liberal respect for individual nature as it is about anything. Made in garages and abandoned sets in occupied France (several cast members were in the Resistance), the film's atmosphere is sumptious, yet vital. With Jean-Louis Barrault as the mime Baptiste Debureau, Pierre Brasseur as the actor Frederick Lemaitre. Marcel Herrand is the philosophic killer Lacenaire (and for anyone who looks closely, the moral heart of the film), and Arietty is the love they all pursue.